_stump · infrastructure engineer

Sounds like management style has a lot of influence over these RCA meetings. You must have a good relationship with your peers if you're all willing to accept responsibility for outages and work together to prevent them. Nice!

That's a great approach. I've used the same many times with mostly positive results.

If you show up to these meetings with some NMS data, you're putting the focus on the data, not you. Otherwise you end up playing defense, and that's when tensions can mount. And +1 for being more interested in the resolution than the blame.

My username starts with an _ .... Perhaps I'm now realizing the folly of my ways.

Sounds to me like you've got a great relationship with your peers, and therefor a great work environment. But those developers, man. They're the worst.

I'm answering these questions, but I'm placing the answers in an unmarked envelope, hidden under a park bench in suburban Virginia. The wriggly bird chirps warmly in the evening. Over.

i got the three weekly phrases right, but the combined phrase isn't working. what am i doing wrong?

I like how we all focus on the "one" we missed, and not all of the ones we got right. Good grief. It was funny to remember the days when the installer screen was... different. Definitely wasn't popular with my female coworkers.

Completely agree. You could view cloud computing as a whole new world of resources to misconfigure and mismanage. But I think this is where old pros can really shine. All of that experience we've acquired managing on-prem is directly applicable to cloud. The names of the tech may have changed, but the functions are…

I hear you re: WUG. I replaced it with Orion NPM, SAM, and NCM last year at one of my customer sites. Great point about each tool have a specific purpose. There's nothing wrong with owning and using specialized tools. But there is a problem when a single environment has multiple "enterprise" monitoring solutions. It's like…

aaron.damyen wrote: "When networking through the vSphere becomes involved, there is a big tussle trying to get it resolved. The trend, however, is that the VM specialists on the infrastructure team are learning the basics of network, insofar as their blade center is concerned." This is what I hear from most people. The…

So if you're not siloed (which is awesome, by the way!), how do you handle project work? Are you matrixed? Or are you less formal and just put teams together based on availability when new projects appear?

I think IPv6 is like the metric system, in that many purists and academics (and even a few practitioners) tout it as the panacea for the world's interconnected problems. Meanwhile, IPv4 isn't going away.... ever. IPv4 is so engrained in the day-to-day life of an IT professional that it's impossible to remove it. We're…

I didn't say there was no benefit to having certified staff personnel. I said that there's less value to the business than a consulting group who can directly translate certification into higher bill rates. You have to make the argument that investing in your personnel will have long-term benefits to the business,…

THANK yOU

Thanks for the comment.

CLI 4 LYF In case you haven't read it, check out this book. It's chicken soup for the CLI soul.

I think a BB app is a bad idea. It's true that many organizations and federal agencies use the platform. But the BlackBerry is on its way out, and has been a dead platform for a while now. If SolarWinds wants to look forward, it can't worry about a ever-shrinking subset of users who would like a BB native app. Lots of…

seriously! hey cbussard@idealintegrations.net: are you guys hiring?

Upgrading users is always an option!

+1 for monitoring services, not just devices. It's like that other post in geek speak that said a customer reported a problem, but the capacity of the link was only at 20%, so there wasn't a problem. Obviously, something made that customer pick up the phone to complain. Saying that there's no problem will just make the…

On the topic of how to manage flash storage: you don't. Every vendor that makes a solution for flash-based storage includes an algorithm-based feature to move data between tiers based on any of a number of criteria. So it's not subject to the traditional storage management model. And it gets even weirder / better with…

Any PowerShell? I'll be honest: the first time I launched the ISE, it was like stepping into a whole new world. I'm still a novice there, but the power of that language is evident.

That's a great point on script sprawl. I always hated inheriting a new environment with scripts and scheduled jobs hidden on many servers, and trying to figure out how to untangle the mess.

srsly. the laser pointer is EPIC.

haha, i know the type of person you're talking about. they attend a single conference, have drinks with a vendor, and come back to the office with a NEW IDEA that will CHANGE EVERYTHING. i'm all for change when it's managed. but run like hell when you hear that you're ditching Windows for kubernetes.

Another great contest! You guys are on a roll!

"unconnected users" The last few places I've worked, you have to be connected to be a user. We have many SaaS solutions of limited utility when disconnected. Initially that seemed like a deal breaker. Remember when Google released Offline mode for Gmail? But now, years later, would anyone see the need to use that utility?…

The interfaces between storage, compute, and network (and dbms and applications...) are the bits that are left out most often. The storage system might be fine, and the blade servers might be fine. But then you have a failure at the fabric level and realize that you weren't monitoring your FC switches. That's just an…

That's a great point. It's exactly why I like to see a combination of tools in use for complex infrastructures. Monitor your storage, compute, and network individually with whatever tools the engineers prefer. But having a single tool that can collect performance stats on the entire solution is beneficial because it…